I guess this is why startups exist because it it almost impossible for larger firms to execute good ideas even if they think of the idea themselves
Every decision you make is second guessed by 8 other people, and anything you do impacts 5 other teams. It's infuriating unless you're the type of person who loves working through people problems, and a lot of developers, including myself, aren't that kind of person.
Also, maybe it has to do with the fact that failure is an expected part of startups, but in the business world there's perverse incentives to build something mediocre, expensive and ultimately useless just to give the appearance of success.
With a startup, you're free to do whatever the hell you want. If it works, it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't.
I guess it would be possible to give in-house teams free reign to try out new ideas without all the organizational friction, but the startup model works, so why not just throw some money at some kids and see what happens?
The traditional name for this is a skunkworks project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunkworks_project
They tried something like it somewhere I worked but messed it up. Everyone needed to pitch ideas then the 'approved' projects were the pet ideas of various suits, put under the same restrictions as regular projects, and choked to death.
In my current project (big co.) we have a technical PM, a non-technical PM, a non programmer dev lead, an scrum master and a lead business analyst, all involved in managing the work of a team of 2 and a half (a sr ba/qa guy, a part-time ssr dev and me). Waste work is probably in the 90%.
Not just middle layers and up. Freeloaders and gatekeepers everywhere.